The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Unfolding Genocide in Sudan

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

The New Yorker recently published a report from Sudan, headlined “Escape from Khartoum.” The contributor Nicolas Niarchos journeyed for days through a conflict to reach a refugee camp in the Nuba Mountains, where members of the country’s minority Black ethnic groups are seeking safety, but remain imperilled by hunger. The territory is “very significant to the Nuba people,” Niarchos explains to David Remnick. “They feel safe being there because they have managed to resist genocide before by hiding in these mountains. And then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled.” The civil war pits the Sudanese Army against a militia group called the Rapid Support Forces. Once allies in ousting Sudan’s former President, the Army and the R.S.F. now occupy different parts of the country, destroying infrastructure in the opposing group’s territory, and committing atrocities against civilians: killing, starvation, and widespread, systematic sexual violence. The warring parties are dominated by Sudan’s Arabic-speaking majority, and “there’s this very, very toxic combination of both supremacist ideology,” Niarchos says, and “giving ‘spoils’ to troops instead of paying them.” One of Niarchos’s sources, a man named Wanis, recalls an R.S.F. soldier telling him, “If you go to the Nuba Mountains, we’ll reach you there. You Nuba, we’re supposed to kill you like dogs.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Your news feed is undoubtedly filled with the crises in Los Angeles and Washington. From abroad, it's likely filled with stories from the Middle East and Ukraine. But the Civil War in Sudan, which the State Department is called a genocide, receives relatively little attention. Recently, the New Yorker published a brilliant report from Sudan by a longtime contributor Nicholas Nyarkos. The civil war pits the Sudanese army against a militia group controlled by a billionaire general. The groups were formerly allies, but now they occupy different parts of the country,

destroying infrastructure in the opposing group's territory and committing atrocities against civilians, atrocities that are directed in particular against members of Sudan's black ethnic groups. At least 9,000 civilians have been killed in the last two years. Over 5 million people have been displaced. That's all according to Human Rights Watch. And I want to mention that our story today addresses widespread sexual violence carried out by soldiers and may not be appropriate for some listeners. Our writer Nicholas Nyarkos did his reporting from a refugee camp

deep in Sudan's Nuba Mountains. Nick, the war in Sudan is something that has not been covered nearly enough, and you did a remarkable piece in The New Yorker, and you were recently there. How did you get there, and what did you see? I joined up with a Human Rights Watch team and flew to South Sudan, and then we took trucks for five days, through rebel territory crossing the border into the Nuba Mountains.

This was a very, very muddy part of the rainy season and many of the roads were flooded and they had this sort of remarkable way of attaching tractors to trucks and then sort of dragging them out of the mud and you had this sort of metal bark that had been welded together in the market and then you'd always have a tractor with you and they would basically rev the tractor until it

just jerked you out of the mud and it was incredibly unpleasant but actually quite effective if fairly slow essentially yeah we went we were traveling for days and days in this way we arrived at the al-hilo camp in an area that you know on first impressions looks incredibly beautiful you you you see these mountains, it's essentially sort of dry grassland with these sort of these peaks looming above you. And they're peaks that are very significant to the Nuba people because they're peaks that have sheltered them four generations. And they feel safe being there because they have managed to resist genocide before by hiding

in these mountains. And then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled, and you start seeing the fear in the faces of young mothers who have brought their babies in suitcases, essentially, and have their babies sitting outside in cribs that have been improvised out of suitcases. let's start with the basics. This is a very complicated conflict and tell me what's at stake, who's fighting whom, and what are the perils? So the conflict in Sudan started in April of 2003 in earnest when a paramilitary faction called the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF, started to try and take power in Khartoum through Kudata. And they,

attacked the presidential palace and the airport and then began this very, very violent campaign in the countryside. And the army fought back against the RSF. And this has basically led to a fragmentation of the country and a whole bunch of local militias have essentially become empowered and have been given weapons by different actors, and the conflict has devolved into what the State Department has called genocide. But what led up to the RSF attack that began this conflict in the first place? The war started really as a clash of personalities. The dictator Omar al-Bashir had been deposed in 2019.

There had been this transitional government, this moment of great hope for Sudan, which is a country that has been through three civil wars. It's been through dictatorship after dictatorship. And the army decided that they were going to take power. And they concentrated their power in the figure of Abdul Fata al-Burhan, a former military intelligence officer who had worked in Darfur, for during some of the worst days of the genocide. But also another very, very popular general, one news report called him a star of the new militarism, was Muhammad de Gallo.

He is known as Hemeti, which means little Mohammed. And he essentially started life as a camel herder and then took part in the war in Darfur and took part in some of the, really some of the most shocking examples of the genocide. And he rose through the ranks of the Sudanese army and was sort of used as a tool during the 2010s by both the UAE and the Sudanese army to quell dissent at home and to fight the war in Yemen. And he, at the same time as doing this, solidified his own wealth. He basically used his militia to take over gold mining areas. He used his militia to seize control of important supply routes. And he became a billionaire.

So the leaders of the warring parties are both from Sudan's dominant Arab ethnic group. They actually worked together to take down the former dictator. What made them turn on each other? This was a situation in which you had this one very, powerful, very rich person coming to Khartoum, and you had the army taking power. And you could see that sort of developing into a situation in which they both decide to share power or they both decide to rule together. But of course, that's not what happens.

There's this great animosity that develops between both Burhan, the general of the head of the army, and Hometti, who's the general. at the head of the RSF. And as one official who has been involved in peace talks in Sudan told me, it was basically as if Hometti, despite his wealth, despite his power, he was not allowed into the country club. And there was this sort of deep resentment that built up. And he thought, look, I'm better than you and decided to try and seize power.

But how is Sudan divided up ethnically and in terms of, of language in terms of race and in terms of politics. So Sudan is an Arabic-speaking country. It is a country that has a majority of Arabs, but you have this black population in the south and in the west, in a region called Darfur and in a region called Kodafan. Those populations are sort of treated as second-class citizens or worse. by the supremacist Arab populations.

Nicholas New Yorkers reported recently from Sudan for the New Yorker. We'll continue in a moment. In your piece in the New Yorker, Nick, you focused on a couple whom you met by the name of Wanis and Intasar, as well as their children. The family made an extremely dangerous journey through the war zone to the Nuba Mountains where you met them. Oneis had actually been a courier and a baggage handler at the airport in Khartoum. He was a sort of simple guy, but also a kind of pillar of his community and was known as somebody who would help out in this very, very poor community of Nuba African. And these are black-skinned African population who live in various parts of Sudan, but they're originally from this area called the Nuba Mountains. So these people were living in a suburb of Khartoum, which was taken by the RSF, by this paramilitary group.

They saw people that they knew their neighbours and people who looked like them, a lot of Nuba people being targeted specifically for their race. They saw, for example, people being shot in the market. They heard stories about rapes that had taken place, and when he decided to get his family out of Khartoum. And on the other side as well, you know, the Sudanese armed forces fighting back against the paramilitary group would often indiscriminately shell their neighborhood or fire, you know, mortar rounds into their street and so on. I mean, it's in a sense that their story is one of the oldest stories. in war anywhere is the displacement. You see this in Gaza. You see this in Ukraine,

and you're obviously seeing at extraordinary levels in Sudan. At one point, the RSF has stopped them over and over again, and in one instance, Juanis is threatened after telling the RSF soldiers where they're headed. Let's listen to him here. And he told me, why are you going there? Most people are They're all righter,

And you're Makhine to Egypt Other countries And why you were going there? And I told him, I'm going to live in my land. And I told him, This is my land.

If I die, I can die in my land. You're If you're You know, if you're Hsuade where, we're We'll ask you. He told him that If you go to Nuba mountains,

we'll reach you there. If they're going to go toba, we're supposed to kill you like dogs. If they go to the Nuba Mountains, they'll be killed like dogs. How many people are in that kind of circumstance in Sudan today? So there are about a million people who fled to the Nuba Mountains and there are tens of millions and more people who are desperately malnourished.

But the Nuba Mountains is particularly complicated because you just have this huge influx of refugees, especially black, black, southern Sudanese refugees who had come to Khartoum to make a better life and then were targeted for their ethnicity by these invading forces. One of the things that you were hearing a lot about was stories of sexual violence. Why does the RSF, the militias, abuse the civilian population, abuse the civilian population? in that way and what's being done about it. Yeah, so I actually spoke to a Sudanese civil society activist. She said that essentially rape was used as a way of rewarding troops.

And then this supremacist ideology, which has existed in Sudan for a long time, sort of comes into play as well. There's this kind of sense that these people are almost subhuman. I think that there's this very, very toxic mix of both supremacist ideology and a culture of giving spoils to troops in lieu of paying them because these militias are often very poor themselves. I mean, everybody had a story about either they were raped or that they knew people who had been raped or they had seen people raped in front of them. I spoke to a man from Darfur named John, who had seen his mother raped by multiple men from the RSF in front of him. They brought me and they asked me, are you soldiers? I told them no. They told me, whom do you have here? They told them I have my mother here.

They brought my mother in front of me and they raped her and because they want to see how you're reactive, I'm a soldier, so you'll bring, maybe he'll bring guns or something like that. I just kept quiet and they were raping her. Fela, if they were upguding her. My mother advised me, told me my son, I'd have to be. My mother advised me, my son, be patient. Ask these things happen to us or to me.

You need to be patient because if you are not patient, so they will kill you too. God, be patient because they'll kill you too. It's appalling to hear. And there doesn't seem to be anyone to defend them from these atrocities. Have any other countries attempted to step in and try to stop the killing? You know, the U.S. has tried to, especially under the problem. Biden administration has tried to support a peace process, and the State Department continues to try and do so. But it has been fairly futile because the Sudanese armed forces don't really want to negotiate,

neither do the RSF. What about something like sanctions on the countries that are bankrolling the RSF? Well, the day that the U.S. put sanctions on the UAE or on Saudi Arabia is that this conflict will probably change, but I don't see that coming. We know what's happened to U.S. foreign aid under the Trump administration, and there's been doge cuts that have nearly obliterated USAID. What's been the impact of that under people in Sudan? At the beginning, there was a lot of chaos, and the ambassadors to Sudan had to reaffirm that because of the gravity of the situation, U.S. aid to Sudan would not be cut. However, there are many organizations, local organizations, which were sponsored through grants, and those organizations, which are often, you know, front-line soup kitchens and things like this, did have their funding cut. and so therefore there's a great deal of effect on the situation and people are not getting food in the way that they used to and the way they used to was not particularly sufficient either.

What would it take to end this conflict? Do you see any sign of a resolution in Sudan? I was speaking to U.S. official in Washington the other day and he was saying that he was saying that he, He thinks it's a fight to the death, basically. It's this rivalry. They hate each other. And, you know, that is going to be the end to the conflict. One of them is going to die. So I think that Sudan is really, really on its own.

So it sounds like we're going to see a great deal more bloodshed and suffering misery and hunger in Sudan for some time to come. Unfortunately, I think that's what we're going to see here. I think that there's, you know, there has been this idea of, and this was something that the Human Rights Watch team that I went with was very pro, this idea of putting in a UN peacekeeping mission. And UN peacekeeping missions have a mixed history, but they're certainly not liked by the Trump administration. And the idea of a peacekeeping mission would be to keep the warring parties away from one another. But the question is, would that just freeze the conflict and put it off to another day? Or would that seriously resolve some of the deep differences between the different warring groups?

History shows that it tends to do the former, not the latter. That is true. But if it staves off the genocidal violence, Perhaps there might be a more pressing short-term need for it. Nicholas Nyarkos, thanks for your reporting. It's always good to see you. Thank you very much, David. Nicholas Nyarkos has been reporting from Sudan,

and you can read Escape from Cartoon, which is focused on Walness and Intesar's Journey to the Nuba Mountains at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC, and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Thank you.